First Casterway (500 SE)
The diaspora begins
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he First Casterway is an apocryphal term. An avatar used to represent a nameless, faceless soul, sentenced to live the rest of his days on a primitive jungle planet utterly devoid of intelligent life. It isn't known exactly when he arrived. Approximately 500 years before the Age of Cervia is the historians' best guess. His name is not recorded. Nor his likeness. It's not even known how long he survived once reaching the planet's surface.
What is known is this: Whoever he was, he arrived. And if he managed to stay alive for more than a couple days, he wouldn't have been completely alone for long. For his arrival marked the beginning of an endless stream of discarded souls given a one-way ticket to Excilior through an ongoing process known as excilation. Sometimes they arrive one-or-two per week. Sometimes a few dozen descend in a single day. But throughout the known history of this planet - over thousands of years - one thing has remained a steadfast constant: the casterways never stop arriving. The names, faces, and circumstances differ for each, but the process is always stunningly similar.
Dropped From The Sky
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very casterway arrives in his own single-use re-entry vehicle known as a dropship. Despite the name, it's less a ship and more an escape pod. Each dropship can barely hold its single passenger. It contains no controls. No communication capabilities. No navigational aids. It is little more than a high-tech slingshot designed to hastily guide the passenger to the planet below... with a bare modicum of safety and/or comfort.
The dropships always arrive at the exact same location on the planet's surface - in the middle of the Dropship Seia. If the vessel performed as intended (not always a given), the passenger finds himself alive-but-stunned, floating in the middle of a vast saltwater expanse, with no ability to guide his direction and no recollection of the world or the society from which he was jettisoned. It's generally believed that casterways arriving on the planet's surface maintain their basic personality traits. But they have no memory of any activities after puberty. This means that they also have no idea what they allegedly did on their home world to deserve this fate.
Left For Dead
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he prevailing westerly winds on the Dropship Seia almost always push the new arrivals to the island continent of Islemanoton within a week or so. After their broken vessel washes up on shore, they find that the device itself begins to slowly disintegrate and, in less than a month, they have nothing from their parent society other than the meager clothes on their backs.
Some drown at sea before ever seeing solid land. Others last mere weeks in the cutthroat biomes of Excilior's jungles and rain forests. A handful go on to live out their remaining days as lonely castaways, quietly eking out a living and waiting for the inevitable conclusion of their own personal dead-end. And it is a dead-end, because every person that has ever been abandoned on the planet has shared one common, significant trait - they have all been male.
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